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Tea Labourers of Silghat
I found plenty of silence to contemplate in Hama, because by the time I got there the waterwheels were broken. The muezzin's voice was deathly still, and the only cries anyone heard permeating the narrow streets came from the widows and orphans who had survived the massacre
Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem
May 2008
The British might have left 62 years ago, but not much has changed since. We’re still sipping whiskey in the evenings outside the cottage overlooking the tea estate on one side and the Brahmaputra on the other, reclining on the lawn beside the canon, looking out over where the boats laden with leaves must have left for Calcutta, while the lizards come out at night and bark like dogs, bark so you grab your glass and sit bolt upright. And the labourers – thousands upon thousands of them imported from Bihar and Orissa in the heyday of the Raj – never did get to own the land, or save enough to crawl out of the tea estates, or afford the tea itself. Today, Silghat employs 680 permanent labourers and 180 part time workers. Together, they pluck around 20,000 leaves from the 332 acres every day, once even 38,000.
Tea gardens are beautiful, and the life they promise upper management is aristocratic, but they are labour intensive because the tea must be handpicked so only the newest of leaves are plucked. And the labour is very cheap. Full time employees get Rs.56 a day, plus 300g of rice and 300g of flour.
In comparison, the tea estate at Silghat managed selling each kilo of its product for Rs.65—80 last year. That isn’t much. In some markets, a kilo can fetch as much as Rs.2,000, especially if it’s the prized Darjeeling variety. But Assam’s tea fortunes, created by the British, are well past their glory days, suffering in this corner of India, beaten into submission by market forces and competition from the only other native tea-growing nation in the world, China.